When Nairo Quintana accepted the offer of the French Arkéa, he already assumed that something like this could happen. Signing for a squad of the second cycling division guaranteed him absolute and unappealable leadership, the one he had longed for in his last two seasons at Movistar, but in turn was going to block the way for some top-level races. The Colombian Tour de France will run, but not the Vuelta a España, which this Friday has confirmed what was already intuited: the Arkéa is left out and, with him, the winner of the 2016 edition, one of the most iconic cyclists of the Vuelta in the last decade.

With the new restructuring of the UCI WorldTour, the three Grand Tours on the calendar have lost decision margin over the teams that line up in each of them. From four invitations they have gone to two. The silver lining was that the Total Direct Énergie would give up its right to run the Vuelta, but the French team has finally chosen to run Tour and Vuelta and remove the Giro from their schedule.

Given this scenario, Javier Guillén and his team were clear from the beginning that the two guest seats would go to Spanish teams, since they understand that it is also the responsibility of the Tour to promote national cycling and contribute to the viability of their projects by giving them visibility in the most important test in Spain.

Varapalo for Euskaltel

And, in this sense, the decision has not been easy either, because in the second division there are three Spanish teams and there is only room for two. The victim has been the Euskaltel Euskadi, which in its first year as a professional team is left without Catalonia, the Basque Country and San Sebastián due to its cancellation and finally without Vuelta. The Basque squad's calendar, in short, will be limited to the second category tests that can finally be held from July or August.

The game has been won by Caja Rural-Seguros RGA and Burgos BH. Navarre is the most consolidated team in Spain after Movistar, so all the pools were given as a favorite. The great performance of Ángel Madrazo in the last edition and the commitment of the Vuelta with the province of Burgos, which will host the departure of the 2021 edition, has weighed on behalf of the people of Burgos .

The other team that has run out of space is Mathieu Van der Poel's Corendon Circus . The Dutch star's plan was to park the cyclocross after the Tokyo Games and debut in a great round in Spain. The pandemic, of course, left that idea on wet paper and the coincidence of the Vuelta with several of the great classics of the traditional spring calendar took away from an option that, in any case, was not going to be possible.

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